Towards the end of the Imgur gallery has created for this project, you can see the software working its way through a few example sketches. The points that the line is to pass through, as well as variables that control knob rotation and pointer speed, are saved into a JSON file so they can easily be loaded later. The software wrote can take an image and generate paths that the Etch a Sketch can use to realistically draw it. Several Python scripts pull all the various pieces of hardware together and produce the final user interface. This solution allows the Raspberry Pi to not only read the rotation of the knobs when a person is using the Etch a Sketch interactively, but spin them realistically when the software takes over and starts doing an autonomous drawing. The knobs are connected to stepper motors with custom PCBs mounted to their backs that hold a A4988 driver chip as well as a AS5600 absolute magnetic rotary encoder. To make his jumbo Etch a Sketch functional, spent more than a year developing the hardware and software necessary to read the user input from the two large 3D printed knobs mounted under the TV. But where’s the fun in that? It took hundreds of hours to print the shell. That alone would be a pretty neat project, and had just thrown some videos of designs getting sketched out onto the display, he could have achieved a similar end result with a lot less work. With a Raspberry Pi and some custom electronics onboard, it can even do its own drawing while you sit back and watch.Īt a high level, what we’re seeing here is a standard Samsung LCD TV with a 3D printed Etch a Sketch shell mounted on top of it. A perfect example is this giant wall mounted rendition of the iconic art toy created by. Continue reading “Building An LED Etch-A-Sketch” → Posted in LED Hacks Tagged etch a sketch, led, toyĬonsidering one of the biggest draws of the original Etch a Sketch was how simple it was, it’s always interesting to see the incredible lengths folks will go to recreate that low-tech experience with modern hardware. We’ve seen other sneaky hacks on the classic toy before, too – like this Samsung TV cleverly hidden in a lookalike shell. The final result is a fun LED toy that, unlike a real Etch-A-Sketch, you can play in the dark. There’s also an MPU6050 accelerometer board, used to enable the intuitive shake-to-clear functionality. Two encoders are used to recreate the famous Etch-A-Sketch interface, hooked up to an Arduino Nano that then communicates encoder data to the Pi over I2C, due to the limited GPIOs available. The build uses a Raspberry Pi to run the show, with a 64×64 LED matrix hooked up to the GPIO pins serving as a display. The inherent limitations of being able to only draw a singular, connected line are all part of the fun, of course, and recreated that in a modern, LED form. Some grew capable of creating masterful artworks, while others struggled to do more than a jumbled mess of angry, angular lines. The Etch-A-Sketch was a toy that demanded mastery. Posted in Arduino Hacks, LED Hacks Tagged arduino, arduino nano, etch a sketch, RGB LED If you’re not much of an artist, here’s a TV-sized Etch-a-Sketch build that can draw by itself. The enclosure is four sheets of 6mm MDF glued together, and we like the use of protoboard to distribute GND and 5 V in the name of keeping the thing slim. Inside the requisite red enclosure with white knobs are an Arduino Nano and a 16×16 RGB LED matrix. And while we’re dreaming up improvements, it would be awesome to add an accelerometer so you could shake it clear like a standard Etch-a-Sketch. We hope one of the colors is setting it back to darkness in case you screw up. Push the left encoder down and it cycles through eight color choices, or push the right one down to go through them backwards. But this wouldn’t be a 21st century toy without newfangled features. The familiar movements are there - the left knob moves the cursor left and right, and the right knob moves it up and down. Instead of scraping aluminum powder off of plastic by driving a stylus on an x-y gantry with a pair of knobs, this bad boy uses rotary encoders to move the cursor around and put down squares of colored light. is bringing the Etch-a-Sketch into the 21st century while at the same time, bringing an even bigger air of mystery, at least for the normies. We never did crack open our Etch-a-Sketch, but we did scrape out a window large enough to really check out the mechanism inside.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |